Saving Gaza from Starvation

On 4 May, the Israeli cabinet endorsed new plans to ramp up the military’s offensive in Gaza, nineteen months into the war sparked by Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on 7 October 2023. Dubbed Operation Gideon’s Chariots, Israel’s incremental plan aims first and foremost to conquer Gaza and defeat Hamas, as well as to free the remaining Israeli hostages in the strip. It also involves taking control of the enclave’s internal aid distribution channels, expanding Israel’s longstanding restrictions on the entry of vital supplies. Since 2 March, aid has been completely blocked by Israel, pushing 2.2 million Palestinians toward mass starvation; the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-coordinated body, warns that Gaza is now at “critical risk” of famine. Operation Gideon’s Chariots has not yet rumbled into motion; Israeli officials say it may start after U.S. President Donald Trump’s much-anticipated visit to the Middle East on 13-16 May and will likely take place in stages. Trump’s itinerary includes stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates but not Israel.

As the presidential trip approached, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee held a press conference to rebrand the aid component of Israel’s plan as a U.S.-led initiative, carefully distinguishing it from Israel’s military campaign and promising its imminent rollout using private security contractors. It was an apparent attempt to assuage Gulf Arab concerns about how it would look for them to be striking investment deals with President Trump while Gaza is being starved. Yet whoever will run the new food distribution scheme, it is not merely insufficient, but misguided and dangerous. Tens of thousands of tonnes of desperately needed food, medicine and supplies are sitting waiting at Gaza’s borders. The dozens of aid groups, including UN agencies, that have been keeping the population alive insist they only need Israel to open the crossings, so that they may recommence their work without fear; they do not need anyone to build an entirely new system. Meanwhile, if Israel’s military operation does move forward as proposed, it is almost certain to unleash even deeper catastrophe for Gaza’s population.

Trump’s forthcoming visit is an opportunity to alter this trajectory. On 11 May, following talks with the U.S. mediated by Arab states, Hamas announced that it would release hostage Edan Alexander (a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen), in effect bypassing the deadlock in its negotiations with Israel. What Hamas might receive in return – if anything – remains unclear. Gulf leaders, who enjoy some influence with the White House, reportedly hope that Trump will express support for the two-state solution while in the Middle East, which would be welcome. But the immediate priority must be pressing the U.S. president to definitively end the war in Gaza and allow humanitarian groups to do their jobs.

A Path to Protracted Reoccupation

The latest plan reportedly calls for beefed-up Israeli army units to capture and “clean” out more of Gaza’s 365 sq km, some 70 per cent of which Israel has already turned into “no-go zones” for Palestinians. Many – perhaps most of Gaza’s population – would be displaced to Rafah, the strip’s southernmost city, which Israel took in March and has all but razed since then. Palestinians are now mostly concentrated around Gaza City in the north, and between Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah in the south, with most having suffered repeated displacement and living in tents or damaged buildings. According to the plan, they would be channelled through Israeli checkpoints designed to sift out those suspected of links to Hamas. They would then be herded into Israeli-controlled “humanitarian zones”, where pre-packaged rations amounting to 1,700 calories per person daily would be distributed to pre-approved family members by private security contractors or Israeli-vetted aid organisations. The first phase of the plan envisions serving only 60 per cent of Gaza’s population, with Ambassador Huckabee saying the proportion would gradually increase over time.

In effect, the plan puts Israel on a path to a protracted, direct reoccupation of Gaza, confining Palestinians to even tinier parts of the strip and enabling Israel to control access to necessities, without meaningful guarantees that these will indeed be provided. Of particular concern is how much of the population will be fed, as well as whether the scheme will afford the specialised treatment needed by acutely malnourished young children and people with chronic diseases or the broader range of basic services necessary to prevent or halt epidemics, which typically become the main killer among starving people.

Whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet has publicised the Gideon’s Chariots scheme as a bluff or truly plans to proceed with it is not fully clear. But the Israeli government appears to calculate that by heaping even greater pressure on Gaza’s already immiserated people, it can force Hamas to release some or all of the 58 hostages the group still holds (between 21 and 24 are believed to be alive, while the remainder are thought to be dead). It also appears to believe that by stopping what it alleges is Hamas’s use of aid flows for financial gain and political leverage, the group can be stripped of its ability to keep fighting and to rule Gaza, with Israel making far fewer concessions than were stipulated in the January ceasefire deal, which it broke on 18 March. (That deal’s first phase saw Hamas release Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, Israeli troops leave parts of Gaza and humanitarian aid increase; rather than move to its second phase, which would have entailed more hostage-prisoner swaps, a full Israeli withdrawal and a negotiated end to war, Netanyahu chose to relaunch the fighting.) Today, Israel proposes only a certain number of days’ truce in exchange for a certain number of hostages. Its government seems to hope that if the military campaign does not force Hamas to capitulate, an uproar from Gaza’s suffering population will. In the longer term, it expects thousands of the group’s Gaza-based leaders and fighters to go into exile, while the remainder would disarm and disband.

The prime minister heralds the operation as an “intense entry” into Gaza; his far-right coalition partners, including Finance Minister and Deputy Defence Minister Bezalel Smotrich, bluntly call it a “conquest”. At the very least, it would be a return to Israel’s direct occupation of Gaza, as existed in the strip from 1967 until 2005 and as still exists in much of the West Bank. But it could also go further. An official bureau, approved by the Israeli government but still vague in its details, is encouraging “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s residents to as-yet-undetermined third countries. The term is a crude euphemism, given that Israel itself has made the strip all but uninhabitable, thus rendering the Palestinians’ proposed departure anything but voluntary. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers are clamouring to be allowed to resettle a newly depopulated Gaza.

Mounting Risks and Opposition

The Gideon’s Chariots plan faces pushback, as does the U.S. aid delivery scheme. Notwithstanding Israeli determination to remove Hamas from power, the army’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, has made clear the risks and limitations of a new escalation: primarily, that it endangers the hostages, whose freedom the army sees as its most urgent goal. Its concern stands in contrast to the statements of the Netanyahu government, whose more overt priority is defeating Hamas even at the hostages’ expense. Hamas’s surprise release of Alexander on 12 May, apparently as a good-will gesture to the Trump administration, exposed the costs of the Israeli government’s tactics, which have evinced a preference for force over negotiation.

Even as it prepares for Gideon’s Chariots, Israel’s military leadership remains wary of what an indefinite operation with no clear endpoint might entail and how high the cost might be. The army is already beginning to suffer higher casualty rates as it enters denser urban spaces; five soldiers were killed in the past week alone. Most of the Israeli public has been indifferent to Palestinian suffering, but the army fears that scenes of starvation could incriminate commanders and soldiers in future war crimes investigations conducted abroad. It is also cognisant of the declining rate of reservists showing up for duty due to war fatigue and public anger about the government’s relegation of the hostage question.

Aid providers so far view the proposed solution as harmful. Israel and the U.S. charge that Hamas is stealing and diverting aid, but UN agencies refute this claim, stressing that they already have “end-to-end” systems in place to avoid that happening. Crisis Group interviews indicate that criminal groups – suppressed by Hamas authorities during most of the war to date as well during as the January ceasefire – are the primary impediment to aid distribution within Gaza, opportunistically profiting from the disorder. The IPC assesses that the aid scheme could avert what it identifies as a “critical risk” of famine in Gaza, yet it would still likely leave about a quarter of the population starving; an expansion of military operations or continuation of the blockade would lead to famine. With one in five Gazans estimated to be starving already, according to the IPC, and the entire strip facing acute food insecurity and malnutrition, drip-feeding aid will not reverse months of harm caused by food, water and medical deprivation.

Israel will also have to contend with mounting international opposition. UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned Israel’s new plan as “a dead end – totally intolerable in the eyes of international law and history”. Governments are growing more vocal, with several European capitals warning that the plan would “cross yet another line”. The Netherlands has called on the European Union to review its Association Agreement with Israel, citing the latter’s total blockade as a violation of international humanitarian law; the EU Foreign Affairs Council is set to discuss the matter on 20 May. The Trump administration, which has hitherto shown little concern for Palestinian suffering in Gaza, now makes the case that “the most important danger is people starving to death” and has urged the UN and NGOs to get on board with its new aid plan. Even so, humanitarian agencies have roundly rejected the U.S. scheme, insisting that they will not participate.

Lastly, the plan would create new operational risks. Israel has been attacking Hamas’s governing apparatus, including police and civil servants, who had continued performing their functions in coordination with Gaza’s clans. Order among the hungry, displaced population has accordingly deteriorated. Israeli troops are not likely to be able to restore it. Nor are private foreign contractors, who will be mistrusted by a society that will view them as an extension of Israel’s military occupation. Hamas fighters and other armed groups, which have largely gone underground amid Israel’s aerial bombardment, may escalate their guerrilla campaign in the vicinity of the “secure distribution sites”, which will be staffed by the contractors and ringed by Israeli soldiers. Weakened as Hamas is, it is unlikely that the new offensive will eradicate the group, which appears to be bracing for an asymmetric war of attrition and continues to insist on a permanent end to the war in ceasefire talks.

Past Time for the World to Act

Though the IPC has made no formal famine declaration as yet, Gaza is being starved. At least 57 people, most of them children, have reportedly died of starvation since the war’s resumption in March, with thousands more at imminent risk. Looting of surviving food stocks, along with theft and violence among residents, is rising sharply as hungry families grow ever more desperate. Mass starvation will almost certainly progress to famine under a continued, complete blockade, and significant risks remain even if the Israeli plan proceeds exactly as described. The overt weaponisation of food and aid, with what has been at least until now a tacit green light from Washington, comes on top of a war that has left at least 52,000 Palestinians killed, perhaps many more, nearly 119,000 wounded and Gaza’s hospitals and health system wrecked, in addition to the massive destruction of property and the immeasurable psychological harm inflicted on an entire society.

The plan to corral as many as 2 million Palestinians into “sanitised” zones, and then to sustain them indefinitely on survival rations, promises only more privation, misery and death. Those excluded from the first phase of the inadequate aid distribution may not survive long enough to benefit from the promised expansion. In short, the stage is set either for forced displacement or for a prolonged period of mass internment, with a high risk of mass death from starvation and disease, barely avoiding famine in the best of cases.

It is long past time for the world’s governments, especially Israel’s friends, to not merely signal outrage or concern, but take active measures to restrain the Netanyahu government. The U.S. is the prime mover in this regard. President Trump is visiting Gulf monarchies in the coming days. While extracting a statement from Trump on the continued viability of the two-state solution, as Gulf Arab leaders reportedly intend to try doing, would be an important step, the priority has to be finding a quick end to the suffering in Gaza. Arab leaders should seek, even if behind closed doors, to persuade Israel’s superpower patron that improvised stopgap measures are not enough. There are ways to end the war, to secure the release of Israel’s hostages – more than 150 of whom have already been freed via negotiations – and to guarantee Israelis’ and Palestinians’ safety that do not entail starving and holding hostage an entire population in Gaza. Indeed, just before returning to the White House in January, Trump helped push Netanyahu into a ceasefire that offered one such path. Now, Alexander’s release, loosening Netanyahu’s chokehold on negotiations, if only for the moment, reaffirms the utility of serious talks. If Israel’s plan is allowed to proceed, it will risk immensely more death and destruction in Gaza. It will chip away at Israel’s already precarious standing across the Middle East and further corrode Israeli society itself. Israel’s closest friends should be the most alarmed by that prospect.